Res Eng Design (2016) 27:307309
DOI 10.1007/s00163-016-0237-0
EDITORIAL
In memoriam
Yoram Reich1
Springer-Verlag London 2016
Offer Shai
19562016
Prof. Offer Shai passed away on 13/7/2016 after a battle
with cancer. He was a friend and a colleague; our offices
shared a common walla metaphor for our shared interest
in engineering design.
Offer was an associate professor at Tel Aviv University,
School of Mechanical Engineering, where he founded the
Laboratory of Mechanisms and Mechanical Systems and
developed a unique and award winning approach to the
analysis and synthesis of mechanisms and mechanical
systems.
Offer was born in 1956. After studying to be a practical
mechanical engineer, he served in the Israeli army as
technical officer in the Ordonnance Corps. He then got his
B.Sc. in mechanical engineering from Ben-Gurion
University, while in parallel, taking courses in computer
& Yoram Reich
yoram@eng.tau.ac.il
1
Tel-Aviv, Israel
science in the Weizmann Institute. For his distinction in
B.Sc. studies, he received the Parliament of Israel award.
After finishing his M.Sc. studies in mechanical engineering
at Ben-Gurion University, for which he received another
award, Offer returned to serve in the army as a develop-
ment officer. Subsequently, he returned to Ben-Gurion
University to obtain his Ph.D., with distinction (Summa
Cum Laude), in Mechanical Engineering. The topic of his
thesis was Representation of Embedded Engineering
Knowledge for Artificial Intelligence Systems.
During his Ph.D. studies, Offer developed courses for
high school students based on his thesis work and taught
them to hundreds of students. The students participated in
various contests and won many prizes awarded by the
ministry of education, President of Israel, the Information
Processing Association of Israel, and the Society of Man-
ufacturing Engineers.
In 1997, Offer joined the school of mechanical engi-
neering as a faculty member and since then led the
mechanism and mechanical systems area in the school.
Offer research and teaching revolved around combina-
torial representations of systems with embedded knowl-
edge. These representations were mainly graphs but also
matroids. They allow representing the relations between
elements in diverse systems, including multidisciplinary
systems, such as structures, mechanisms, electrical circuits,
biological systems, economics models, and chemical
compounds. These representations also have relations
among them that capture not only the structure of systems
but also the knowledge embedded in the representations.
These relations create a network of representations that
opens up major opportunities. One can represent a system
in one domain and transfer its model through the network
and obtain a corresponding system in another domain that
will have exactly the corresponding behavior.
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For example, one can take a rectifier circuit from elec-
tronics and transform it to a mechanical rectifier, or take a
transistor and transform its model to mechanics, obtaining
a mechanical transistora new invention by Offer.
Similarly, abstract concepts could be transferred
between disciplines as well as analysis or synthesis meth-
ods. In this way, Offer was able to transfer concepts from
several different disciplines to structures and find and
characterize a new concept in mechanics which he called
face force. For the discovery of this concept and its asso-
ciated knowledge, he received the A.T. Yang Memorial
Award in Theoretical Kinematics in 2005. The face force
has become a driving force in advancing Offer work.
Recently, the collection of mathematical representations
and their related tools and properties was named The
Interdisciplinary Engineering Knowledge Genome to
reflect the role that it could serve in engineering like the
genome in biology.
Mechanical rectifier (Appeared in Shai and Y. Reich, Infused
design: II practice, Research in Engineering Design, 15(2):108-
121, 2004.
Mechanical transistor (Appeared in O. Shai, Y. Reich, and D.
Rubin, Creative conceptual design: extending the scope by
infused design, Computer-Aided Design, 41(3):117-135, 2009.)
In order to develop his ideas, Offer had to also develop
some of the mathematics required for his research. He
collaborated with leading mathematicians in matroid the-
ory and rigidity theory by bringing knowledge from engi-
neering to address tough problems in mathematics in a
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Res Eng Design (2016) 27:307309
bootstrapping processengineering knowledge helped
develop mathematics which then was used back in engi-
neering. The results of these studies were published in
mathematics and engineering journals.
One of his contributions in this field was on Assur
graphs. The origin of this concept is from 2D mechanisms
that cannot be broken further, and Offer extended them to
3D and also transferred the concept to other disciplines.
With these concepts, Offer developed a method that allows
generating all the topologies of 2D structures by using very
basic operations on simple primitive structures, for which
he received the second A.T. Yang Memorial Award in
Theoretical Kinematics in 2010; subsequently, he extended
this work to generate all the 3D topologies of structures.
3D model of an Assur graph
Another interesting area that Offer developed was
tensegrity structures. This structure is stable if all its
members have internal forces. They are lighter than com-
mon structures due to the use of cables. A special topic in
tensegrity structures is their use as moving or folding
structures. Offer developed an approach to develop such
folding systems that relies on his face force concept.
Tensegrity is not only a human-made structure; it is com-
mon in living systems as a supporting structure. One result
of Offers work on tensegrity was modeling the movement
of a caterpillar based on tensegrity structure model of its
body. Other results include the characterization of all sin-
gular positions of tensegrity structures and with them the
singular positions of parallel mechanisms that are dual.
Folded tensegrity structure
Res Eng Design (2016) 27:307309 309

Offers work on mathematical representations of sys-

tems, their associated tools, and implications to robotics,
mechanisms, and structures, as well as to rigidity theory in
mathematics is considered a breakthrough. Its long-term
potential value to engineering is yet to be discovered. Offer
will be missed by his colleagues, collaborators in three
continents, students, and friends. I hope that his work will
continue to live and flourish among us.
Yoram Reich
Tel Aviv
September 7th, 2016

The deployed tensegrity structure

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